Monday, January 31, 2011
AFRICAN AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES & PLANNING
321 W. Antrim Drive P.O.Box 16102 Greenville, SC 29607
Thursday, September 14, 2010
Contact: Efia Nwangaza
Email: enjericho@aol.com
Tel: 1-864-901-8627
US Human Rights Report Touts African-American President, Attorney General, Secretaries of State, But Silent on Still Imprisoned Black COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era Political Prisoners and Ongoing political repression in the U.S.
The personal achievements of the current U.S. President, Attorney General, and past Secretaries of State of African descent, noted in the United States’ first Universal Periodic Review Report (US UPR, The Report) to the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, are unique to them. Many continue to hope that their success will become more than symbolic and that U.S. participation in the UPR process will have a transformative effect, resulting in actual and broader opportunities for all African Americans and other disenfranchised peoples of the United States and the world; despite its deeply flawed, self-serving submission.
The U.S. Report highlights the United States’ founding mythology and references the joint petition, “An Appeal to the World!,” presented, after great difficulty, by Dr. W.E. B. Du Bois (and Walter White, NAACP National Secretary), to an assistant of the first UN General Secretary, Norwegian politician, Trygve Lie, on October 23, 1947. It was at the height of the Palestine Partition debate. The petition was not presented to the General Assembly, but received worldwide recognition and support of UN nations. Among other things, it appealed to the UN, as a last resort, to call for an end to U.S. apartheid, Jim Crow segregation, and structural barriers, policies and practices preventing African Americans from full social, economic, cultural, and political rights as provided by the U.S. Constitution, statutes, and UN obligations; especially, the still prevailing violative electoral system based on African American, particularly male, criminalization and voter disenfranchisement.
Structural disenfranchisement operates today, despite the successful 1960’s U.S. Civil/Human Rights Movement referenced as “a model of civic engagement and political participation.” Sadly, like the U.S. Constitution, the 1965 Voting Rights Act still allows disenfranchisement and forced labor due to “criminal conviction,” an enforcement avoidance loop hole. The United States has a long history of racialized criminal laws designed to impose servitude and prevent political participation. They continue to evolve from the 1600’s Slave Codes, 1860’s Post-Civil War Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the 1960’s Modern Civil Rights Acts neutralized by “Law and Order” politics and hyper-criminal codes with draconian sentences and civic and social death of every form. Today’s hooks are the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs.”
Currently, African American males account for 35 percent of all Americans now barred from voting because of felony convictions. Two percent of all Americans, or 3.9 million, have lost the right to vote, compared with 13 percent of adult Black men. Note, while the incarcerated cannot vote, they are warehoused in prisons located in rural, predominately white localities and counted as residents, reminiscent of slavery when African Americans were counted as 3/5th human, for purposes of political representation and public funding.
As a result of this practice, of which Dr. Du Bois complained, the incarcerating locality is credited with increased representation and funding and the inmate’s community, to which he will return, remains under represented and underfunded. An opportunity for the Obama Administration to address the disproportionate levels of unemployment, inadequate housing, educational equity, and healthcare (not insurance) about which The Report claims dissatisfaction.
It is in this repressive environment, a longstanding tradition of resistance by African Americans, and the optimism born of successful global independence struggles that, like its contemporaries in India, Ghana, Kenya, Southern Africa, Cuba and elsewhere, internal resistance to U.S. apartheid escalated. It came from nearly all sectors of society. As a result, organizations dedicated variously to peaceful protests, passive resistance, direct action, insurrection and armed resistance emerged.
The Obama Administration referred to only one sector of the modern Civil/Human Rights campaign; the sector with which the government chose to negotiate when forced to negotiate. However, together, like the wings of a bird, all sectors combined to apply the varying degrees of pressure that precipitated the negotiations, the resulting laws The Report applauds, and the positions U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, and other elected and appointed African American office holders, as well as Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and traditionally marginalized members of U.S. society currently enjoy.
U.S. apartheid, in its various forms and degrees of repression, sparked robust internal resistance which was met with virulent official and quasi-official violence. The corresponding political aims of the militant members of the modern U.S. Civil/Human Rights campaign have been discounted, criminalized, and they still languish in U.S. prisons. They are survivors of the dually celebrated modern U. S. Civil Rights Movement and the Congressionally determined illegal COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era law enforcement vigilantism which included murder, mayhem, false charges and convictions, medical neglect, and continuing, interminable, retaliatory denial of parole and incarceration of 40 years and counting. They are as former UN Ambassador Andrew Young once noted, political prisoners in U.S. prisons.
Unlike the newly formed government of South Africa and states resolving major internal upheaval, no Truth and Reconciliation Commission nor the well deserved clemency awarded others has been offered to these stalwart human rights champions, political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles, in and for the more than 40 years of progress the U.S. report celebrates. This is a violation of their and their communities’ human rights and the United States’ obligations under the UN Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the U.S. Constitution.
Along this same line, The Report fails to address the growing number of broadly defined laws, policies, and practices which suppress dissent and charitable contributions, require government reports and affirmations for bank accounts or property rentals. It is silent as to the increased number of persons incarcerated, isolated in custody, under surveillance, and organizations infiltrated, criminalized, and labeled “Terrorist,” under the guise of national security and “The War on Terror.”
Police still routinely make unfounded mass arrests and detentions to keep people off the streets and out of the eye of the media. There is the return of harassment and arrest of unembedded media, monitoring of social networks, and police-initiated violence at demonstrations, and use of so-called less-lethal weapons against peaceful protesters. These weapons—including chemical sprays, impact projectiles, and electroshock weapons, cattle-prods of the 1960s—are often associated with fatalities. This practice persists though condemned by several independent panels and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Ongoing and pervasive profiling throughout the United States on the basis of race, immigration status, national origin, religion or ethnicity, under the guise of fighting illegal immigration, drugs, and terrorism, have resulted in increased migrant deaths, mass incarceration, and use of torture against African Americans and other persons of color. Arizona’s SB 1070 has been instituted in several states, with modifications from recent court orders and in anticipation of Justice Department litigation. Law enforcement officers, throughout the country, who have engaged in torture and extracted confessions continue to escape prosecution while individuals who were tortured continue to be prosecuted or languish in prison based on the use of coerced confessions in their criminal cases.
The Government’s increasing disregard for the U.S. Constitution and its human rights obligations is further displayed in its treatment of Muslim, Arab and South Asian inmates. In 2006 and 2007, the Federal Bureau of Prisons secretly created the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a prison unit designed to hold “dangerous terrorists and other high-risk inmates, requiring heightened monitoring of external and internal communications.” Many such prisoners are sent to these isolation units for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, in retaliation for challenging poor treatment, or other rights violations; over two-thirds are Muslim, even though Muslims represent only 6 percent of the general federal prison population.
In 1996, the U.S. government established Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) to limit the communications of prisoners with an alleged reach and ability to commit violence. Now SAMs can be placed on anyone with a “proclivity for violence.” Without criminal conviction, contact and communication even with family members can be limited. SAMs are imposed disproportionately on Muslims “suspected of connections with terrorism” and is typical of terrorism suspect’s treatment in U.S. prisons and courts.
“All of these issues are of utmost concern to U.S. civil society organizations because the U.S government, State and Justice Departments especially, is liable for enforcement and protection of the rights and person of people in its borders and under its jurisdiction. Further, the U.S. holds itself out as the global leader in human rights and is accepted in many quarters as the operative standard thus influencing the treatment of people around the world. If U.S. civil society’s concerns are to be addressed and the hope placed in the Obama Administration properly laid, the U.S. government must take leadership in public human rights education and official enforcement. Then, U.S. participation in the UPR process will have a transformative effect, resulting in actual and broader opportunities for all African Americans and other disenfranchised peoples of the United States and the world; despite its deeply flawed, self-serving submission,” stated Efia Nwangaza, Director, African American Institute for Policy Studies & Planning.
The African American Institute, under the auspices of the US Human Right Network (http://www.ushrnetwork.org), is involved with the UN’s first Universal Periodic Review of the US, which is scheduled to take place in November 2010. The UPR assesses each country's adherence to its human rights obligations under the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), human rights treaties ratified by the country, its voluntary commitments, and applicable international law. During the review, the “national report” provided by the country under review, the reports of UN bodies, and reports from other “stakeholders” such as civil society and national human rights institutions, are considered by the UPR Working Group. African American Institute, Ida B. Wells Media Institute, and the October 22nd Coalition wrote a cluster report on POLITICAL REPRESSION: Continuum of Domestic Repression. Ms. Nwangaza also co-authored POLITICAL REPRESSION: Political Prisoners (COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era) stakeholder’s report.
FO: US Human Right Network go to: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/upr_reports .
321 W. Antrim Drive P.O.Box 16102 Greenville, SC 29607
Thursday, September 14, 2010
Contact: Efia Nwangaza
Email: enjericho@aol.com
Tel: 1-864-901-8627
USA: STATE REPRESSION
9th United Nations Universal Periodic Review
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: State Repression
September 14, 2010
While recent years mark key anniversaries in U.S. political and social history, e.g. public accommodation, voting rights, school desegregation, civil rights and anti-war protest landmarks, the protection and advancement of civil and human rights have declined amidst the celebration of these landmark years. The current environment tends to be little more than a cover for law enforcement which has grown increasingly more repressive and hostile to the U.S. Constitution's 1st, 4th, 13th, 14t,h , and 15th Amendments, in addition to international obligations.
The United States has remained true to its longer history of political repression and use of its criminal justice system to quash dissent. In addition, it falls short of meeting its international human rights obligations as provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.N. treaties which it has ratified, and other international instruments. More specifically, its violations are of basic human rights protected in the International Covention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Police in the United States, along with other arms of law enforcement, continue to be used to suppress efforts demanding recognition, protection and fulfillment of social and economic human rights; namely, the right to education, health, housing, work, and social security. Such efforts, sought individually and collectively, have, and continue to be primary targets and are met with racial profiling, surveillance, infiltration, provocation, immobilization, arrest, detention, police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, excessive sentences, and death --all with impunity. 1960s Civil Rights Movement activists caught in the government drag net known as COINTELPRO are victims of such misconduct and remain in prison to this day.
Police still routinely make unfounded mass arrests and detentions to keep people off the streets and out of the eye of the media which tends to be accommodating. There is the return of police-initiated violence at demonstrations, arrest of unembedded journalist, and the use of so-called less-lethal weapons against peaceful protesters. These weapons—among them chemical sprays, impact projectiles, and electroshock weapons, cattle-prods of the 1960s—are often associated with fatalities. This practice persists though condemned by several independent panels and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Ongoing and pervasive profiling throughout the United States on the basis of race, immigration status, national origin, religion or ethnicity, under the guise of fighting illegal immigration, drugs, and terrorism, have resulted in increased migrant deaths, mass incarceration and use of torture against African Americans and other persons of color. Law enforcement officers, throughout the country, who have engaged in torture for the purpose of extracting confessions continue to escape prosecution while individuals who were tortured are prosecuted or languish in prison based on the use of coerced confessions in their criminal cases.
In addition to the Abu Ghraib style Chicago Police Torture Cases (Burge Cases) of 1973, is the current case of the San Francisco 8 (SF8). Both are examples of the longstanding domestic use of torture against African Americans by law enforcement officers. The Burge Cases were based on race. The SF8 case is based on race and political beliefs and activities. 30 years ago, Black Panther Party for Self Defense members ( a social justice organization) were tortured over several days, in various ways including electric cattle prods to their genitals, confessed and signed pre-written statements regarding various crimes and the 1971 death of a San Francisco Police officer. In 1974, a federal court ruled that the tainted statements were inadmissible and the charges dismissed. Not only have the perpetrators never been brought to justice, but two of them now serve as agents with the Anti-Terrorist Task Force of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office under the auspices of U.S. Department of Homeland Security and have resurrected the dismissed charges based on the tainted confessions. A violation of article 5(b) and (d) of the Convention guaranteeing the right to be free of excessive force and the rights to freedom of speech, expression, assembly and association.
The Government’s increasing disregard for the U.S. Constitution and its human rights obligations is further displayed in its treatment of Muslim, Arab and South Asian inmates. In 2006 and 2007, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP or “Bureau”) secretly created the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a prison unit designed to hold dangerous terrorists and other high-risk inmates, requiring heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. Many prisoners, however, are sent to these isolation units for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system. Over two-thirds of the CMU population is Muslim, even though Muslims represent only 6 percent of the general federal prison population.
In 1996, the U.S. government established Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, to limit the communications of prisoners with an alleged reach and ability to commit violence, now SAMs can be placed on anyone with a “proclivity for violence.” Without criminal conviction, it limits contact and ability to communicate with the outside world – including members of the family. SAMs are being imposed disproportionately on Muslims suspected of connections with terrorism and is typical of how terrorism suspects are being treated in U.S. prisons and courts.
RECOMMENDATION FOR ACTION BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
1. Take leadership role to insure creation of public education and protections afforded underU.S. Constitution and international treaties and conventions are applied vigorously.
2. Adopt and ratify all major treaties and conventions, without RUDs.
3. Commute the sentences and release all U.S. Political Prisoners/Prisoners of War (PP/POWs) and exiles from the COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era immediately and unconditionally.
4. The United States must institute an Executive Review of all cases involving those imprisoned as a result of COINTELPRO and adopt the necessary measures to ensure the right of COINTELPRO PP/POWs/Exiles to seek just and adequate reparation and satisfaction to redress acts of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and to design effective measures to prevent the repetition of such acts.
5. That Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier, at a minimum, be afforded a new trial.
INFO: US Human Rights Network go to: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/upr_reports .
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: State Repression
September 14, 2010
POLITICAL PRISONERS IN THE USA
9th United Nations Universal Periodic Review
Political Prisoners
In the
United States of America
September 14, 2010
In 1976, a Congressional sub-committee popularly known as the “Church Committee” was formed to investigate and study the FBI’s covert action programs. The Church Committee concluded that the FBI “conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” The Committee’s factual findings revealed massive human rights violations against U.S. citizens based on race, political ideas, and political affiliations.
In the final reports of the Committee, permanent means of congressional review were recommended. Shockingly, none of the recommendations made by this Congressional committee addressed the human rights violations suffered by dozens of Civil/Human Rights activists who were victimized by the U.S. government’s political repression against African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native American communities. Such repression resulted in murders, injuries, false arrests, malicious prosecutions and lengthy imprisonments of scores of political activists. Many of these persons languish in prisons throughout the United States, political prisoners and prisoners of war, subjected to cruel and inhumane conditions. Several have died in prison; others have endured years of solitary confinement, poor medical care, and various other forms of abuse, including periodic,perfunctory parole hearings resulting in routine denial of release. Others are exiled abroad with bounties on their heads and in fear of U.S. rendition.
Today's political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles were Civil/Human Rights activists who became victims of the FBI counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO consisted of a series of covert actions directed against domestic dissident groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret actions designed to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals. These techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence techniques. It is indisputable that COINTELPRO was responsible for maiming, murders, false prosecutions and frame-ups, destruction, and mayhem throughout the country. It had infiltrated every organization and association that aspired to bring about social change in the United States, whether with or without the use of arms. Hundreds of members of the Puerto Rican Independence movement, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords, the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), members of the American Indian Movement (AIM),
______________________
1 This Report was submitted by The National Conference of Black Lawyers and The Malcolm X Center for Self Determination. The cluster group is comprised of NGOs, grassroots organizations, church groups, attorney organizations, elected officials, college professors, law professionals, students, concerned citizens, and others. Read the UPR Political Prisoner Report:
http://www.ushumanrightsnetwork.org/sites.default.files.PoliticalPrisonersReport.pdf
the Chicano Movement, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), Environmentalists, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Peace activists, and everyone in between were targeted by COINTELPRO for "neutralization."
Government Repression Included Murder
In 1969, the FBI and local Chicago police agents were responsible for the predawn assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as they lay asleep in their beds. Hampton and Clark were the leaders of the Chicago office of the Black Panther Party.
Harsher Sentences and Repeated Denial of Parole
Many of today's political prisoners were incarcerated as a direct result of COINTELPRO's activities, namely, they were targeted because of their political beliefs and/or actions. Unlike those convicted and sentenced for similar crimes, political prisoners were given much harsher sentences and subsequently routinely denied parole. Former BLA member, Sundiata Acoli (a.k.a. Clark Squire), the codefendant of exiled Assata Shakur, was sentenced to life plus thirty years for the death of a New Jersey State trooper. He was eligible for parole after twenty years. After serving twenty-two years, however, the New Jersey parole board denied him parole and gave him an unprecedented twenty-year set off. Susan Rosenberg was sentenced to fifty-eight years for possession of explosives and denied parole despite her exemplary prison record. Mumia Abu Jamal, a former Black Panther Party member, was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Leonard Peltier was sentenced to life in 1975; another model prisoner, he was denied parole again in 2009. Acoli and Peltier are but recent examples of the use of the parole process to exact political punishment. Parole officials often acknowledge the advancing age, deteriorating health, significant release plans and good prison records of these aging PP/POWs.
Recommendations
1. All U.S. Political Prisoners/Prisoners of War (PP/POWs) imprisoned as a result of COINTELPRO must be immediately and unconditionally released from U.S. prisons.
2. The United States must institute an Executive review of all cases involving those imprisoned as a result of COINTELPRO.
3. The United States must initiate a criminal investigation into the conspiracy to commit the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and other political activists targeted by COINTELPRO.
4. The United States must adopt the necessary measures to ensure the right of PP/POWs to seek just and adequate reparation and satisfaction to redress acts of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and to design effective measures to prevent the repetition of such acts.
5. The United States must, at a minimum, afford death row inmate Mumia Abu Jamal, and, Native American Leonard Peltier, new trials.
INFO: US Human Rights Network go to: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/upr_reports .
Political Prisoners
In the
United States of America
September 14, 2010
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